Published: February 27, 2026
Five Questions with Mark Dowdle
Mark Dowdle
Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Fortifi Food Processing Solutions
Where does acquisition fit in with Fortifi’s approach to global growth?
Food processing is a complex, highly diversified global industry. Our growth strategy is built to compete across multiple food categories and to support a broad range of applications throughout the value chain.
Acquisition is a deliberate component of that strategy. Acquisition enables us to build our strengths with the best capabilities in the world and to add these strengths to our overall collaborative system. With each acquisition, we add vision, reach and insight.
As part of Fortifi, our business units gain access to greater research and development strength than they would have on their own. They collaborate across the portfolio, participate in larger and more advanced initiatives and accelerate innovation through shared knowledge. We incorporate their technologies into our broader offering and reinforce their ingenuity with the scale, infrastructure and centralized strength of our platform.
What are three of most-important aspects of company success for Fortifi and its businesses?
First, we are a technology-driven company that provides innovative thinkers with room to grow within the global reach of our organization. That combination of technology and people-centric culture makes our company a very attractive place to work, and that helps us attract the best and brightest minds in this industry.
Second, we bring the strength of a long and proven track record in product development. Several of our business units have spent more than 50 years refining solutions to highly specific food processing challenges, building deep technical expertise and application knowledge. Combine that institutional experience with the advanced technologies we are deploying today – including machine intelligence and AI – and the result is a powerful integration of legacy expertise and next-generation capability. We are not simply preserving our history; we are extending it. By pairing hard-earned industry knowledge with modern digital innovation, we ensure our solutions remain relevant, competitive and forward-looking in an evolving marketplace.
Third, we prioritize the ability to anticipate customer needs, including the products they expect from us and the service that defines proactive support. We design and build products of the highest quality, and we back them with support that can monitor production and solve problems before a customer even notices a change in output or performance. Together, these three elements – exceptional talent, deep product heritage enhanced by modern technology, and proactive customer partnership – work in alignment. Our people fuel innovation, our experience anchors it in practical application and our technology and service infrastructure translate it into measurable customer value. Each reinforces the others to create sustained competitive advantage.
What’s the most-overlooked aspect of business development in a global enterprise?
We don’t cut corners. We are intentional about every aspect of quality, from how we design a product to how we respond to a customer or install equipment. Internally, we tie every phase of our growth and development to business cases and shareholder value. Those business cases involve much more than financial return. For example, our definition of value includes our emphasis on safety as a foundation of workplace harmony and job satisfaction. In an employee-owned company, these values mean much more.
We are equally intentional about how we choose our partners and whom we select. This is as much about integrity as it is about capabilities. It’s not enough for a potential asset to offer new ideas. Those ideas require a foundation of logical thinking and a shared focus on empathic leadership
We also are unafraid to be aggressive when strong action is the key to success in a new market or with a new application. This form of aggression is the straightforward willingness to roll up our sleeves and get the job done, regardless of whether the task is difficult or complicated.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth in food processing as a business?
Food processing is an industry that benefits demonstrably from technology but has shown hesitance in adopting it. The reasons behind that hesitance are complex. Essentially, they boil down to three things. Many processors abide by historic traditions associated with manual operations. Tight profit margins leave little budgetary room to invest in any solution that looks at all experimental to decision makers. Most food processing leaders haven’t worked in industries that have adopted automation and therefore haven’t seen the benefits firsthand. Technology provides a growth strategy. We can show food processors how these solutions benefit their bottom line and where they can achieve the greatest increases in product quality, production speed and overall efficiency. Once they see how transformative these technologies can be, they see how technology can boost their businesses and make them more profitable.
Which aspects of growth do you consider most important in measuring the advancement of worldwide business development?
Just as the food industry is many things, so is a global company. Our individual business units care about their communities, and they invest that caring into volunteerism with food-related organizations. We are known for the ways we invest ourselves in the places where we do business, and the relevance with which we act locally in ways that make sense where we are. We are as committed to helping the food industry make better products as we are to eliminating food loss, waste and insecurity.
Our growth is congruent with our empathy, our ethics and the energy we put forth to do things well True growth is the reward for being good global and local citizens.
